I believe in writing code that is easy to understand, easy to test, and easy to refactor. Yes, I realize that the statement above is pretty general and open to interpretation. Not everyone needs external tools to ensure quality in their code...but, I work on things from time to time that have absolutely no tests. [...] For whatever reason, this happens a lot more frequently in the PHP world. I'm guilty of not writing tests and checking how I write code, sometimes, too. Things are bright, though, for the PHP community - for quite some time now, we've had fantastic tools that assist us in writing better code.

He covers each of the tools, talks some about what they're good for and gives examples of their use, including output. He also talks some about the Pfff set of tools created by Facebook. He also talks some about how these tools fit into his daily work as a part of his pre-commit hooks in git.

There is a great deal of frameworks, PHP ones in particular, fighting for developers attention. Zfort Group is an interested party in terms of choosing the best PHP frameworks for our custom PHP projects and internal ones as well. So we are continually investigating trends, developers' voting, forums, reviews, ratings, etc. We collected unique and very interesting information and it could be really helpful to the PHP community.

They pulled in some data from other sources as well. It's interesting to see which of the options came out highest in the numbers. They looked at trends for Yii, CodeIgniter, Zend Framework, CakePHP and Symfony. They detail some of the features of each framework including the required PHP version, complexity and quality of community/documentation.

Ever since I changed my job (from Business Intelligence to Web development) and started working with my present employer, I have had a chance to work on a lot of scalable projects. From making my project to scale from 20 Million PV's to 100 Million PV's to development of an internal tool, the answer to all scalable applications have been caching. [...] Here in this post I would like to pen down my experiences while working with all the caching mechanism. Their pros and cons. What things you need to take care while working with them and every little tit bit which comes to my mind while writing this post.

For each of the four options he describes what kind of caching they're good for, what they can do and a few "gotchas" to keep an eye out for when implementing them in your application.

Zend Framework has become an immensely successful project. [...] There's a large community of contributors, over 15 translations of the documentation and runs some cool apps like IBM's QedWiki. We are currently looking to grow the team with very experienced Senior Web developers, both from within and outside the PHP community.

Those interested should look forward to working in a "broad, vibrant and passionate community". Check out the full job description for more information.

PHP frameworks are the latest hot topic in the PHP community, and new frameworks are being released daily. With over 40 frameworks available it's difficult to decide which framework works best for you, especially as each framework offers different functionality.

In this article we will look at ten popular frameworks, and compare them to each other. First I will give you a general chart which gives you a quick overview of all the frameworks, and after that we'll go through each framework and discuss it in short.

They start with the chart mentioned above for those that just want to boiled down version of the reviews. From there, they work through each, describing general details about them and the general feel that the author got from them as they developed in them. Of course, there is no real "winner" when it comes to this kind thing. Sure, there's always a few that rise to the top as more well developed and suited for more of the projects out there, but it's really more about what fits for you, not an overarching single framework to do it all...]]> Mon, 20 Mar 2006 07:27:00 -0600